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$60 coasters in some pretty packaging.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: February 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

However, Gamespot had the foresight to see through this act with their"What Happened to Ultima IX?" exclusive a couple of yearsago, interviewing one of the key disgruntled dissenters from the Ultima dev team. It would seem that Origin's glory day had long passed us on the wayside, and we had been listening to a charismatic apparition insist otherwise.

No introduction need be made for the myriad of technical migraines that await the intrepid gamer attempting to run this beast on his machine, courtesy of other exasperated reader reviews here. However, if you do get it to run quasi-decent, probably due to something along the lines of a Pentium III chip, 256 megs of SDRAM, and a Voodoo III card, still brace yourself for clipping issues, swimming snags, and progressively boggy performance due to a pathetic inability of the program to unload its own cache.

Ah, and now on to the review of the game's artistic merits! Or lack thereof! The bugs make Ultima Ascension an atrocity as it is without adding aesthetic insult to injury, which this game's design unabashedly indulges in. If you're a long-time fan as I am, prepare to return to your beloved Brittania and witness it bastardized and twisted into a grotesque tourist attraction for the Action/Adventure gaming crowd. Except that no respectable Action or Adventure gamer would waste their time or money on such a half-assed pile of code as Ultima Ascension, not with a laughably simplistic combat system with bogus "progressive tier" skill levels, idiotic enemy AI, and blatantly derivative Tomb Raider mechanics in its multitude of dungeon crawls, except not nearly as fun as the Lara Croft romps. Outside of that, the game's design is definitely Ultima-lite. There will be no camaraderie of one's party as in past Ultima's, thanks to its "new and improved" lone wolf approach. There will be no sense of personal identity with the Avatar, due to male-aryan typecasting and the inclusion of impersonal and histrionic voice-acting. There are also no pure prose descriptions of your adventures to simply read since everything has to be voiced off to you, giving the meat of the script a very eviscerated feel. Lastly, there is not nearly as much of an expansive landscape to explore, thanks to the "new and improved" 3D engine, which compared to its isometric ancestry, scales back everything enormously. To sum it up, it's a painfully small world after all.

Ultima Ascension introduces its own unique faults in its present incarnation. An inferior inventory system based on slot allocation is used instead of the more realistic and welcome weight and volume system of before. I spent more time worrying about what to carry than what dangers I might have faced on the road. There is a belt pouch, ala Diablo, but it's little reprieve. The interactive cursor undergoes some equally unwelcome changes from its previous version in past Ultimas, for no good reason. Be prepared to irrevocably use potions and scrolls before making the negative transition.

The plot consists of a linear itinerary of shrine-cleansing in order to purge the land of its anathemas, with some rote moralizing thrown in, as opposed to the complex sociology of past Ultimas. It's the worst type of RPG advancement cliché that wouldn't be out of place in the 8-bit Nintendo's Dragon Warrior. So much for those shades of grey Garriot supposedly professed his love of in storytelling. During the game, I felt like some character actor dragged in to reprise the Avatar role one last time, take my cues, affect heroism where needed, and basically act like the stalwart hero needed for OSI's marketing machine, with none of the soul of my past adventures. Shortly into the game I started regularly consulting a walkthrough, because in my apathy I couldn't be bothered to solve the game's contrived puzzles on my own. I never had to resort to such measures in past Ultimas, not even with Pagan, my enthusiasm for the advancement of the plot speaking for itself.

All hail Beast British and his tyrannical virtues, the Sosarian Sell-Out Extraordinare. The real king-of-the-hill in the CRPG world is Interplay, their Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Planescape: Torment franchises speaking for themselves. Interplay is the gaming company today that Origin never aspired to me; let its epics speak to you, and leave Origin's Ultima ruination in the dust.

If there was a ZERO star rating,I would use it.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: February 17, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game is a joke.Let me tell you why.It took me 4 tries to install it on my computer.It crashed 3 times in ONE day.I am `running` it on a 800mhz athlon with 256megs of ram and a geforce ddr,and it is a TOTAL S-L-I-D-E S-H-O-W.If I had a intel 1.5 gigahertz,512 megs of ram,and a next gen 3d card,i might get 30 frames per second.I hear all this stuff about how good of a rpg this is if you look under the `bugs` {these are not mere `bugs`,these are supa` bugs of the worst kind,i.e.crappy programmers and rushing pr people dont mix} I cannot see past the bugs,because i dont work at intel and i do not have access to a prototype gig plus CPU. I keep my system in top shape,so I know its not my cpu.if you have anything less than a athlon 800,256 ram,geforce,forget it.wait for some miracle patches,hope they work,and wish you saved the money for Diablo 2. A BIG BIGG BIGGG U-P-S-E-T.I am quite upset to see this series go to the dogs. {mouse64 cries] :[ REVIEWER: Mouse64.look for my Quake 3 and asheron`s call reviews! look for me in the THISTLEDOWN server in asherons call! I am mouse the sick,and i will hook you up with weapons! DIABLO 2 DIABLO 2 DIABLO 2 DIABLO 2....

Must need a serious graphics card to run it

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: December 08, 1999
Author: Amazon User

One star only because I haven't seen it play--- Haven't had a chance to play it yet. The package says it needs an 8meg video card but it won't recognize my Diamond Viper 330 w/ 8megs. I sent an e-mail to tech support on the Ultima website a couple weeks ago to see if there was a patch or something to fix it and haven't heard from them yet. I guess this one will have to go on the shelf for awhile until I can get a Voodoo3 3000 card.

Biggest dissapointment ever

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: June 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have played all the Ultimas in my time and for the most part loved them all. I was one of the people standing in line for Ultima 9 when it came out. When I got home I put it on my computer right away. After about 2 hours I finally got it to install correctly, and found nothing but bugs and bad game play

1) You have to do every quest exactly as your told to no matter what.

2) Nearly every quest had a bug that made me reload at least one time usually ten times though.

3) Where are these stuning graphics in this game. They were ok but nogthing compared to other games that came out at the same time.

4) This is my biggest complaint. The game is choppy.... and Neither of the computers I put it on were .... The first one was a PII 400 with 320 Megs of SDRam and a TNT 2 graphics card, and the other is a PIII 1000 with 256 Megs of Ram and a Geforce3 and its still choppy!!!!

So my edvice is to avoid this game like the plague!

Complete Disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: March 17, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I don't know why people would give this game a good review. It is the buggiest piece of crap I have ever played. Who cares if the graphics are stunning ... the game isn't even playable! Bugs prevented me from going farther in the game at several points, forcing me to go back to old saved games. After the fourth or fifth time, I quit playing. After an hour of playing, the game slows to a crawl and needs a reboot. It crashes quite often. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. YOU WILL BE DISAPPOINTED.

Still Buggy and No Support.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 25, 2000
Author: Amazon User

U9 could be a good game. Not a great game, but a good one. Unfortunately, even with the so-called "Final Patch" the game is extremely buggy. Origin calls it the Final Patch because they claim to have fixed all the bugs. Yeah, right. They may have fixed all the plot-stopping bugs, but many bugs do remain. For example, whenever I try to bind a spell to my spellbook, it crashes to windows. Some people can't even get the game to run at all. Combine this with the fact the EA tech support absolutely will NOT respond to any requests for tech support, and this game deserves 1 star. I strongly recommend against buying this game, but if you do buy it make sure you buy it from your local EB or Babbages so you can easily return it in case it won't run on your system. It's very sad actually. Even if you play this game 3 years from now, only the performance will be better because you'll have a more powerful system. But because Origin and EA don't want to waste any more time on a bug-ridden product, the game will still be very frustrating and un-enjoyable.

Sucks

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: January 25, 2000
Author: Amazon User

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME if you don't at least have a 3D FX video card. The DirectX support 'from the box' is non existant. You need to download at least patch 1.07 And even then, I got random ejections to the desktop, refusal to load a saved game, and when actually playing a SLOOOOOOOWWW framerate.

What should have been a great game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: June 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I bought this with the hopes of a fun, addictive and diverse roleplaying game. Unfortunatly that didn't exactly turn out to be the case. The only way I see fit to best describe this game is by listing the pros and cons.

PROS:
1. AMAZING graphics, makes you really feel like your in an actual world.
2. NPC's have sets of speech that actual actors speak.
3. Easy to play
4. Fully Useable Terrain, climb mountains, swim, get lost in the forest.
5. Day and Night Cycles and Rainstorms

CONS:

1. Huge Requirements, This required(s) a beastly system to play on otherwise it's really choppy or in some cases doesn't even work.
2. BUGGY, There is tons of bugs that managed to make it on here that can make you very frusterated while playing.
3. The main quest is almost always boring! Even worse most of the side quests pertain directly to the main quest. This makes almost everything seemed forced. When your doing something, your doing it because according to the quest your on you have to.

4. Combat is also very boring, Archer,Staff fighter, Swordsman, its all the same (just run up to what your fighting and click away BORING)
5. There is no "working up skills" The only advances your character gets are from completing part of the quest. ONCE AGAIN VERY FORCED PLAYSTYLE.
6. Sure the magic spells are neat, but most of them are useless. (I easily got through the whole game using minor heal and fireball)
7. The game is often to challenging to be fun, I cant count how many times I absolutly HAD to refer to a walkthrough because I was stuck. Most of the time the solution to being stuck was something i truely would have never found without looking at the guide.
8. Dungeons are almost all based on puzzles, Sure the puzzles were cool but with the exception of a few rats you might have to kill here and there the puzzles are all you do! BORING
9. Your Virture you get in the beggining of the game had nothing to do with anything! It may say you start on the path of a druid, but all that actually means is you will start with different equipment than that of a shepard. (I was a tinker, {did hat i start with have anything to do with a tinker NO})
10. I thought the ending was terrible, I played the game for about 80 playing hours for this!
11.. I Save the worst for last. ITS QUITE EASY TO SCREW THE GAME OVER. You have to do the quest exactly as your told or you can screw up the game and have to reload (this should never happen in a game.) In worst cases you may be following the quest and do something wrong withen it which causes the game to screw up. I vividly remember having to reload way back in time because i did the Sacrifice quest before the Justice quest, even though the option to do the Sacrifice quest was given to me, The game apparently wanted me to do the Jusstice quest first.

If you want a good roleplaying game I really wouldn't recommend this. This game was hardly diverse, boring and virtually everything you did in it was forced.

An Ultimately Sad Finale

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: January 08, 2000
Author: Amazon User

First, let me introduce our computer: Pentium II 400 128MB RAM Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Creative AWE64 Gold Running Win98 w/ latest drivers & versions of Direct-X

We've had this machine for awhile and have never had any problem running anything until we tried to run Ultima: Ascension. Very nice opening sequence (we've seen it about 100 times, but that's about all we've seen), wander around the Avatar's house until CRASH. No problem. Go to web-site and get the latest patch. That will fix it, right? WRONG! Run game, CRASH! No problem. Go back to web-site, to message boards this time. Lots of solutions, but guess what: NO ANSWERS! So what do you have to do to run this game? You got it! Buy a computer designed especially to run Origin products. Right.

Bottom line: do not buy this game until every virtual Dick & Jane can see Spot run when they load it up. Otherwise expect that you will more than likely be the proud owner of a very nice box. Yes there are others who seem to be running the game just fine. If you know one of them play it on their machine.

It is a pity that the last game in this lovely series should be such a bug-ridden wreck, especially considering the loyalty of those who have played these games from first (C-64) to last (Cray? ). I am really hoping that Origin makes the effort to resolve the problems because, frankly, I'd like to see how it all ends (and so would a whole lot of others). This is only my opinion based on my experience.

neither longtime fans nor action gamers will care for this

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: February 02, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing Ultima games for several years. Played u7(both), u6, u4, uw1,uw2, and the dismal U8:Pagan and UO. This is not a bad game, but it is a bad Ultima IMO. It's clear that Lord British went the way of u8 and forgot about the promises made in fans.txt in the u8 patch. The problem is that we were led to believe that it would be something that it is not. No party, no female avatar, chase camera view like Tomb Raider, no npc schedules, very tiny towns with a few npcs a la Diablo, very few side quests not part of the main plot.....you get the picture. This should have been called "An Avatar Adventure," or something like that rather than the grand finale to this series. Read the Horizons bulletin board. As for the game itself, the graphics and vistas and such are suitably spectacular, though not really any better than Drakan. Some,but not much world interactivity. It has graphic glitches and clipping problems all over the place. It is more bug-infested than a garbage can in summer; random crashes, corrupted save games, you get the picture. It is clear that this was rushed out the door just before Christmas to make some extra gold pieces for OSI. Plus, ridiculously high system requirements. Gamers with pIIIs and even Riva Geforce and tnt2 cards are getting lousy framerates making play quite a bit of drudgery. It's clear that the D3D support here is very poor. Those with voodoo3 cards apparently do the best. Whether that changes with patch3 I dunno, I haven't downloaded it yet. Play was marginally acceptable on my 128 meg system with a voodoo2. I could say more, much more. Don't buy from anywhere where you can't return it, please. Gamespot.com said it best...most disappointing game of the year.

The game world is very small. Regardless of what anybody says, this game is quite linear, forcing you to go where the game wants you to go next. Not what I expected in an Ultima. Indeed, doing stuff out of order has been reported to 'break' the game and is not recommended. Definitely has the feel of an action/adventure and not a CRPG.

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